Your middle-of-the-week flutterby ...
Justin was always a selfish, installed and otherwise unelectable public figure.
What changed?
Canadians grow tired of him at the moment but has their overall outlook on what a statesman should be changed?
Nope:
Respondents to a new Postmedia-Leger poll were asked whether they thought Trudeau was staying because he wanted to implement new policies, because he wanted to face off against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, because he didn’t think his party had any better options or whether he just liked his job.
In total, 47 per cent of respondents thought the reason was: “He likes being prime minister and doesn’t want to leave.”
Less than a quarter (23 per cent) of respondents believe Trudeau’s repeated assertion that he won’t quit because “he has more policies he wants to implement,” whereas 15 per cent think it’s because he wants an electoral face-off with Poilievre.
Trudeau has repeatedly said he will lead the Liberals into the next election despite his unpopularity, saying that he still has much work to do as prime minister. He’s pointed to ongoing reconciliation work with Indigenous populations as well as additional housing and child-care policies.
The Postmedia-Leger poll, meanwhile, found that 66 per cent of Canadians are dissatisfied with Trudeau’s government, compared to 27 per cent who are satisfied, and only 16 per cent think he makes the best prime minister among current party leaders.
The prime minister’s stated reasons for staying don’t appear to ring true even among his own supporters. The Postmedia-Leger poll suggests that less than half (45 per cent) of Liberals think he’s staying on because he has more policies he wants to implement, while one third (32 per cent) believe he just likes being prime minister.
And I thought that the knowledge was supposed to be solid:
Three years after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc first published the explosive news that they had uncovered the graves of 215 children, the First Nation is now officially referring to the 215 as “anomalies” rather than confirmed graves.
It must be all of those bodies that were never recovered.
A glimpse at what the second of Canada's censorship bills has done:
According to an April study from the Media Ecosystem Observatory, Trudeau’s Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18, has caused a 84 percent drop in engagement for local Canadian outlets, as Big Tech company Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has refused to publish links to Canadian news outlets on their platforms.
“We lost 70 per cent of our audience when that happened,” Iain Burns, the managing editor of Now Media Group, which manages news posts for outlets serving smaller communities, revealed. He further explained that he experienced a 50 percent loss in revenue following the move.
“We’re not the only ones. Many, many outlets are in this situation,” Burns added.
The Online News Act, passed by the Senate in June 2023, mandates that Big Tech companies pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms. While the legislation promised to support local media, it has seemingly accomplished the opposite.
While Meta has blocked all news on its platforms, devastating small publishers, Google agreed to pay Canadian legacy media outlets $100 million to publish their content online.
The study, a collaboration between the University of Toronto and McGill University, examined the 987 Facebook pages of Canadian news outlets, 183 personal pages of politicians, commentators and advocacy groups, and 589 political and local community groups.
“The ban undoubtedly had a major impact on Canadian news,” the study found.
The study found a 84 percent drop in engagement for Canadian outlets, with small local news outlets being the most affected compared to larger government-funded outlets.
Also - Mary Simon hosted an event supporting Canada's third censorship bill.
It's easy to sit at a trough and pontificate:
In an exclusive interview with Global News on Tuesday, Simon said the country needs to show more respect online — and says a lack of it has affected her personally.
“That was something that I went through. And then my family was affected and it has a toll on you, both in terms [of] your emotional well-being and your mental health,” Simon told Global News’ Nathaniel Dove in Toronto
My family is affected by an outdated and over-priced public office and the tyrannical efforts to silence opinion on that.
New Covid ventilators bought at $22,000 apiece were sold in a hurry as scrap to “further understand” the recycling business, the Department of Public Works says in an Access To Information document. Records show the ventilators bought under a sole-sourced $169.5 million contract were scrapped even while the pandemic was ongoing: “This has not been a cheap enterprise.”
The CBC's main purpose is to act as a propaganda machine for the Liberals.
CBC managers in the fiscal year just ended March 31 awarded themselves $14.9 million in bonuses even as CEO Catherine Tait claimed financial hardship and laid off 141 employees, documents show. Records tabled in Parliament directly contradicted testimony by Tait that she had no idea whether or not bonuses were paid: “I really take objection to being called a liar.”
Look at all of those diverse faces!:
.@CdnHumanRights Commission feared for staff “safety” after backlash over its report on #Christmas, according to Access to Information #cdnfoi.
— Holly Doan (@hollyanndoan) May 21, 2024
Report denounced Christmas as racist observance “grounded in Canada’s history of colonialism."https://t.co/tGcIKsfMVW #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/dy7TdFpA6p
Ebrahim Raisi is still not missed:
Thirty-five years after taking part in the massacre of thousands, President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter went down over a mountain. Inside the chopper was the body of the man viewed as the likely future Supreme Leader of Iran along with his Foreign Minister and various other officials of the Islamic terrorist regime.
The Iranian people celebrated the death of the man known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ with fireworks and dances. Many of those celebrating were the women whom he had tormented for so long.
President Raisi was said to have harbored a special hatred for women and he has been held responsible for everything from prison rapes to the torture of pregnant women. The cleric and former prosecutor had overseen the brutal suppression of human rights protests against the Islamic regime as part of a record of his crimes against humanity going back to the 1980s.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran had brought many monsters to power. Raisi among them. One of the Islamic student radicals who turned a nation with freedom and civil rights into a ruthless Islamic theocracy, Raisi also represented the last generation of the revolution. Still in his early sixties, it was expected that he would usher in the next era of the Islamic Revolution.
But within weeks of Iran’s likely arrival at a nuclear threshold, Raisi went down in a Bell helicopter that the United States had exported to Iran back in the era of the Shah. Iran had spent billions on nukes, ballistic missiles and drones but neglected to invest in developing its own civilian aircraft. While the price of putting guns ahead of butter is usually paid by civilians, it was the ‘Butcher of Iran’ and his entourage, including Iran’s Foreign Minister, who paid the price for their murderous obsession with nuclear weapons with their lives.
The Islamic regime’s allies, Iran, Turkey, Russia, and even the European Union scrambled to help. A UN spokesperson said that Secretary General Antonio Guterres “is following reports of an incident with Iranian President Raisi’s aircraft with concern. He hopes for the safety of the president and his entourage.” But while there may have been mourning at the UN and on college campuses, there were celebrations by Iranians who remembered all too well the atrocities perpetrated by Raisi.
And for widows still mourning their husbands and children mourning their parents, the bloody tide of Islamic atrocities by the Jihadist regime goes back to when Raisi was a young man and the ‘Will of Allah’ and ropes attached to cranes took their loved ones away from them forever.
Why is everything bad "Russian-inspired"?
Is blackface "Justin-inspired"?
Perhaps it should be:
Georgia's parliament voted on Tuesday to override a presidential veto of a bill on "foreign agents" that has plunged the South Caucasus country into crisis, ignoring criticism from the West which says the legislation is authoritarian and Russian-inspired.
The vote to ignore the objections of Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, whose powers are mostly ceremonial, sets the stage for the speaker of parliament to sign the bill into law in the coming days.In an address after the vote, Zourabichvili, who is trying to broker an alliance of opposition parties to contest parliamentary elections on Oct 26, said ruling party lawmakers had chosen "Russian slavery", and encouraged people to vote them out at the polls.The dispute about the draft law has come to be seen as a key test of whether Georgia, for three decades among the most pro-Western of the Soviet Union's successor states, would maintain its Western orientation, or pivot instead to Russia.The bill would require organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from overseas to register as "agents of foreign influence", while also introducing punitive fines for violations, as well as onerous disclosure requirements.The Georgian government says the bill is necessary to promote transparency and to stop what it describes as a plot by Western countries to drag Georgia into a war with Russia.Thousands of opponents of the bill gathered outside the fortress-like parliament building during voting on Tuesday for the latest in a series of demonstrations that are among the largest in Georgia since it won independence from Moscow in 1991 as the Soviet Union crumbled.Protester Giorgi Amzashvili said lawmakers who had voted to override the president's veto were "the most treacherous people in our history".
Who, pray, would benefit from such low standards?
Patients?
Medical students whose efforts and heritage will be second-guessed after the inevitable disasters these policies will spawn?:
Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).
Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.
So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee's meeting.
Their reservations were not well-received.
When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.
"Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?" Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate's scores shouldn't matter, she continued, because "we need people like this in the medical school."
Even before the Supreme Court's landmark affirmative action ban last year, public schools in California were barred by state law from considering race in admissions. The outburst from Lucero, who discussed race explicitly despite that ban, unsettled some admissions officers, one of whom reached out to other committee members in the wake of the incident. "We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants," the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. "This is troubling."
"I wondered," the official added, "if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion."
Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university's Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.
Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a "failed medical school," said one former member of the admissions staff. "We want racial diversity so badly, we're willing to cut corners to get it."
This story is based on written correspondence between UCLA officials, internal data on student performance, and interviews with eight professors at the medical school—six of whom have worked with or under Lucero on medical student and residency admissions.
Together, they provide an unprecedented account of how racial preferences, outlawed in California since 1996, have nonetheless continued, upending academic standards at one of the top medical schools in the country. The school has consequently taken a hit in the rankings and seen a sharp rise in the number of students failing basic standardized tests, raising concerns about their clinical competence.
"I have students on their rotation who don't know anything," a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. "People get in and they struggle."
It is almost unheard of for admissions officials to go public, even anonymously, and provide a window into confidential deliberations, much less to accuse their colleagues of breaking the law or lowering standards. They've agreed to come forward anyway, several officials told the Free Beacon, because the results of Lucero's push for diversity have been so alarming.
"I wouldn't normally talk to a reporter," a UCLA faculty member said. "But there's no way to stop this without embarrassing the medical school."
Within three years of Lucero's hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report's rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics. ...
One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don't know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.
"I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," the professor said. "Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students."
The ANC rose as an answer to apartheid.
South Africans vote in national and provincial elections on May 29 with opinion polls suggesting the governing African National Congress will lose its majority for the first time in the democratic era, while remaining the largest party.
Under South Africa's constitution, voters elect 400 members of the National Assembly, who then elect the president by a simple majority. In all previous elections since 1994, the ANC won and lawmakers elected the party's leader as president.
After decades of spiritual emptiness and self-indulgence, it is time to believe again:
The 2024 edition of the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté Pilgrimage was a great success once again this year. 18,000 pilgrims flocked to Notre-Dame de Chartres, which can be counted as one of the most famous cathedrals in France. Initially conceived for the faithful attached to the traditional Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church, the ‘phenomenon’ of the Chartres pilgrimage has now been taken on board by the major media as an unmissable event in the French and international Catholic world.
In just a few hours, the pilgrimage was fully booked after the opening of the registrations. In the face of the flood of applications, registrations were closed in record time, and the organisers had to impose restrictions—limiting the possibilities, for example, for pilgrims to join the walk en route, over the three days needed to cover the hundred kilometres or so that separate the centre of Paris from Chartres cathedral. Once again, the pilgrimage organisers have mastered the task, with their well-honed processes and meticulous ballet impressing observers.
This year, the influx of pilgrims was such that not all were able to take part in the launch Mass celebrated in Paris in the church of Saint-Sulpice—the second largest church in Paris used by the faithful since the fire at Notre-Dame. A first contingent therefore left the city in the early hours of the morning to attend Mass a little later, outside the capital.
The phenomenon was already noticeable for the 2023 edition but was confirmed this year. The pilgrimage has gone from being of interest only to a handful of traditionalist Catholic community media to arousing the curiosity of the major national media. BFM TV reported a “record attendance” and “ever younger” participants. Catholic media outlets, that were not so long ago anxious to keep their distance from those who are sometimes affectionately and sometimes contemptuously referred to as “tradis,” followed the three-day march with interest.
Given the popularity of “Chartres,” a new language has appeared in the mainstream press. Journalists are careful to point out that, while the pilgrimage is dedicated to traditional liturgy, the public taking part is not limited to that. The majority of walkers are not regular devotees of the Mass known as that of “Saint Pius V”—celebrated in Latin according to the canons laid down by the holy pope at the Council of Trent, with the priest facing God. It is as if they wanted to reassure themselves that, after all, the appeal of this liturgy, which so many have worked so hard to sell as austere and reactionary, was only secondary. A little more and the crowds would be turning out just for the nice atmosphere and to meet good comrades.
Of course, there is truth and falsehood in all this. It is undeniable that the Chartres pilgrimage speaks far beyond the circles used to the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass). But there are few one-off pilgrimages that are capable of attracting so many people, even though the pace is very intense and represents a real physical ordeal. So those who agree to take part have to find “something extra”—the traditional liturgy, to be precise.
No one finds lukewarm sermons uplifting, or enjoys the diluting of the Mass.
Also - you got your attention. You may go:
A Catholic priest may be arrested for defending the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ from an angry lesbian woman who crushed several hosts and tried to illicitly administer herself Holy Communion, prompting him to bite her arm.
By all indications, Father Fidel Rodriguez of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in St. Cloud, Florida, acted appropriately when the woman tried to take what she later described to police as “the cookie” from him at a 12 p.m. Mass last Sunday.
The cookie?
Just ... wow ...
And - I think I like football now:
In his first public appearance since enduring relentless attacks from mainstream media outlets for his pro-family commencement address last week, Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker showed no sign of backing down, declaring that the “shocking level of hate” is a clear sign that “timeless Catholic values are hated by many.”
The three-time Super Bowl champion delivered his latest remarks at a fundraising event in Nashville for the Regina Caeli Academy (RCA), a classical preK-12 homeschool hybrid for Catholic families. Butker serves on the academy’s board.
“The theme for tonight’s gala, ‘Courage Under Fire,’ was decided many months ago,” began the tuxedoed Butker, “but it now feels providential that this would be the theme after what we have all witnessed these past two weeks.”
The timeline of Icelandic volcanic activity:
MAY 29, 2024
An eruption started near Hagafell on the Reykjanes peninsula after intense seismic activity in the area.The nearby fishing town Grindavik, the Blue Lagoon luxury geothermal spa, and a geothermal power plant in Svartsengi were evacuated ahead of the magma outburst.MARCH 16, 2024
The eruption between the Hagafell and Store-Skogfell peaks lasted for 54 days, making it the second-longest on the Reykjanes peninsula since 2021.It erupted in the same area as the previous outburst and spewed smoke, molten rock and bright orange lava from an estimated 3 km (two-mile) fissure.FEB. 8, 2024
This eruption lasted roughly a day, with lava spewing 80 meters (260 feet) high from a 3 km crack.Lava flows damaged pipelines after which hot water supply used to warm homes was cut off during freezing winter temperatures. The Blue Lagoon closed after lava covered a road.JAN. 14, 2024
The eruption lasted two days, and the lava flow reached the outskirts of Grindavik, home to nearly 4,000 inhabitants, setting three houses alight.
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